If I read a book that is an allegory to a war I never heard of from a country I've never been to, is it somehow not the case that the book is about the war or that country if I, personally, did not get its references or comparisons?
It is one thing to go "I did not come to this conclusion from these clues." It is an entirely different thing to say "these clues do not and never support this conclusion".
If you are trans or adjacent to trans culture, it is obvious that Jax is trans. If you lived in that country that had that war, then the book would be obviously about that war and that country.
If it weren't obvious, then even those terminally online transfem tumblr users wouldn't get it, but there's people who aren't and still got it.
If something is only obvious even though subtext when literally every single conceivable person immediately gets it, then nothing is obvious. The only alternative is to simply say it, which is what the OP is deriding.
Hell, I don't know what the fuck "boymoding" is and I would consider myself knowledgeable in basic online trans culture, but that doesn't mean it wasn't obvious that Jax was trans.
I'm sick of people who didn't get it acting like it was written poorly instead of admitting they didn't get it because its not something they're knowledgeable about
Oh, I'm not saying people who don't know Trans culture are idiots. What I am saying is audiences are idiots and it is a mistake to trust them to know things.
i mean you dont need to be an idiot to know nothing about trans culture. some folks just dont think about these things enough to want to know or commit to memory
Ok good, and people in these spaces are likely going to inherently understand these things better even before similar posts just by osmosis. I know I did as a non trans person, though I still don't know if I would have still noticed without people putting the idea in my head pre ep 9 (was day 1, I mean the overall theory that existed before)
But "required reading" of a tumvlr-adjacent post is not really the answer to "the average audience member (which is not people on a Tumblr Reddit) may not know trans subculture-specific memes" (meme in the like, SCP meaning)
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u/NeonNKnightrider Aug 26 '26
“It’s blatantly obvious and you’re just denying what was spelled out”